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Practest builds digital tools for GP and healthcare practices across the UK, aiming to strip time out of the system without stripping out the human interaction that makes it work. Sacha Wright co-founded the company with Owen Terry and the two of them have built the model around small, strategic and high-touch fixes rather than a full rebuild.
Sacha spent years in financial services before Practest, working across the UK, China and Australia with organisations including Mastercard, Coles, Tesco Bank and RBS. That background, inside large, heavily regulated systems, taught her how legacy infrastructure actually behaves and what it takes to change it without breaking what's already working. It's a skill set that turned out to matter a great deal once she and Owen turned their attention to the NHS.
Where the thinking started
Part of that thinking traces back to her father, a GP in the Orkney Islands whose deep, personal knowledge of his patients let him diagnose most of them before they'd even finished explaining what was wrong. Late in his career, when the surgery gave him a computer, he kept it under the desk. He didn't want a negative test result to be the end of the conversation, and he wasn't going to let a screen get in the way of looking further. That's the principle Sacha's carried into Practest: technology should support the relationship between a practice and its patients, not compete with it for attention.
It's also the lens she applies to the wider system, which she sees as having added a lot of complexity without adding much clarity. GP practices now carry pharmacists, social prescribers and nurses alongside doctors, and most patients have no clear picture of who does what or when. Layer that onto a system under constant pressure to hit targets it was never resourced for, and what you get, in Sacha's reading, is a workforce and a patient base that both need better communication before they need more software.
Fix the slice, not the system
Sacha cites a figure of over 13 million hours of GP time lost every year to inefficient processes, and Practest's answer isn't to rebuild the whole thing. It's to find the parts of a process that are high volume and high touch, and take a slice out of them. Repeat prescriptions are the example she comes back to most: nobody's going to fix that process end to end, but shaving a few minutes off it, repeated across enough patients, adds up to something that actually moves the needle and frees up phone lines for the calls that timely need a human intervention.
"We cannot fix the whole repeat prescription process, but we can fix small amounts of it. If you even shave off five minutes for something that's as high touch as that, suddenly you can really change it." — Sacha Wright, Co-founder, Practest
It's a principle that scales beyond prescriptions, and arguably beyond healthcare: don't try to solve everything, find the narrow, repeated pain and take a bite out of it.
Building with, not around, a co-founder
Sacha and Owen had already worked together for several years, since the early days of lockdown in 2020, before Practest existed as a company. That history meant the split of responsibilities was never really up for debate. Owen leads on technical development and user experience, Sacha handles client-facing work, business management and finances, and the company has grown fully bootstrapped, which she describes as slower but far more flexible than the alternative. There's no external voice factoring in direction, so the two of them can respond to what the market and their patients need on their own time.
What mentorship did for Practest
Sacha's route to Techscaler goes back further than most: she started on Pathfinder, the Highlands and Islands accelerator, moved through a CodeBase mentor, and was among the earliest founders through Techscaler's door when the programme launched. She later completed a Techscaler funding accelerator, and decided, with that knowledge in hand, that the right time to raise hadn't arrived yet. What made the earliest difference wasn't core funding advice. It was being told, by someone who understood the sector, that the idea was worth serious time.
"The mentorship in the beginning was the first time that we heard that we actually had a good idea, that it was something we should be investing time and energy in." — Sacha Wright, Co-founder, Practest
A Techscaler trip to Silicon Valley gave her something different again: a chance to test Practest's technology against a market she'd never physically stood in. She came back reassured that the product wasn't behind where it needed to be, and clear that the US healthcare system is different enough from the NHS that Practest's core UK product wouldn't simply transplant. The other lesson landed harder than she expected. She'd gone in thinking Silicon Valley would be about cutting-edge technology, and instead found a very significant advantage sat with marketing and positioning. She's carried that back into how Practest builds its own route to market, and it's the advice she'd give the next cohort making the same trip.
Starting further back
Sacha is candid about what it costs to build a company as a woman from a rural island, rather than framing it as a footnote. Female founders tend to start with less capital, fewer connections and more caring responsibilities layered on top of the business itself, and she felt every part of that on the Silicon Valley trip, where she built a spreadsheet just to coordinate who was looking after her kids and when. Geography adds its own tax. A flight to high-activity spots like Edinburgh runs her close to £300, London more again, and a programme grant that doesn't cover travel can quietly cost more than it gives back once flights, hotels and lost working days are added up. She doesn't pretend any of that is minor. But she's also clear it isn't a reason to sit it out.
"Techscaler has ensured that I can do those things, that I can still meet people. I've still got access to a lot of the opportunities" — Sacha Wright, Co-founder, Practest
What's next
A major website provider for GP practices recently shut down, and Practest is now targeting the customers it's left behind, not with a like-for-like replacement, but with the more holistic approach to patient communication Sacha's spent years building toward. Alongside that, Practest is developing a bespoke system for a US partner in the addiction space, an adjunct to healthcare rather than a rebuild of its core UK product, and has started working with an AI lab to explore where the technology can genuinely help rather than replace. None of it changes the underlying test Sacha applies to every decision: does this actually save a doctor or a patient time, or is it just one more system sitting between them.
"One of the things Techscaler has done really well is find these opportunities and given us more of a level playing field to be able to access them." — Sacha Wright, Co-founder, Practest
Get involved
Techscaler supports startups across Scotland through education, community and international market access programmes designed to help founders build and scale ambitious businesses. Click here to find out more about Techscaler and upcoming programmes.
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